The many Galens of the medieval commentators on vision/Les multiples Galien des commentateurs médiévaux de la vision

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Despite several publications on the history of Russian medicine of the 17th and 18th centuries, this period remains insufficiently studied. The works of the first Russian historians of medicine ― V. Richter, Ya.A. Chistovich, and L.F. Zmeev ― are well known. Unfortunately, their works do not always contain an accurate description of historical facts and correct dates of events. This refers to the era of Emperor Peter the Great ― the reformer of Russia, founder of the regular Russian army and navy, and reformer of Russian medicine and military medical education in the country ― as well as to the history of the Apothecary order. The focus is on the date of the appointment of the closest associate of Peter the Great, a professional doctor Robert Erskine, to the position of head of the Apothecary order and to the position of Archiater, the chief of all military and civil medical institutions in Russia. We have already written briefly about this in our earlier publications. This important issue continues to cause controversy and disagreement among historians. Professor Ya.A. Chistovich argued that Robert Erskine was appointed to the position of Archiater only in 1716, according to the date of issuance of the Letter of Peter I to Robert Erskine: April 30, 1716. Earlier, in the historians opinion, the boyar, Prince Ya.N. Odoevsky, was the head of the Apothecary order and the chief of all medical institutions in Russia. He had no medical education but had successfully carried out the reforms during the Great Northern War (17001721). In 1907, an outstanding Russian and Soviet scientist, jurist (lawyer), historian of Law and Medicine, Master of Police Law (1907), Doctor of Police Law (1919), Doctor of Historical Sciences (1943), Professor Nikolai Yakovlevich Novombergsky (18711949), after many years of studying and analyzing archival documents of the 17th and 18th centuries, convincingly proved the incorrectness of statements by L.F. Zmeev (related to 1714) and Ya.A. Chistovich (related to 1716) on the date of appointment of doctor Robert Erskine to the position of Archiater. The great work by N.Ya. Novombergsky Development of Russian medicine in the pre-Petrine era (1907) was presented by him as the dissertation for a masters degree in Police Law, and he was awarded the Grand Prize named after Count A.S. Uvarov of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Russia (1908). The author paid special attention to the history of the Apothecary order and documented that in 1706 Doctor Robert Erskine was already an Archiater. The appointment of Robert Erskine as Archiater in 1706 significantly influenced the further development and establishment of Russian medicine, and this year was the most important for the Russian medical service. Our study of archival documents of the beginning of the 18th century, published documentary sources, and scientific works on the history of medicine, has confirmed the evidence and conclusions of N.Ya. Novombergsky. On April 30, 1716, Robert Erskine was granted the rank of the actual state councillor. An analysis of the text of the Letter of Peter I to Robert Erskine has also confirmed that event.

Abstract: The article analyzes the main milestones of the prominent Ukrainian doctor, public figure, writer of the early to mid-twentieth century Sofia Parfanovych. There are three main aspects of her historical heritage: scientific, educational and literary. New variants of topics of lectures and seminars for studying the history of Ukrainian medicine of the beginning of the XX century in the course of disciplines “History of medicine” and “Development of medical knowledge” are offered.

This chapter focuses on Daniel Sutton's method of 'Suttonian' inoculation against smallpox. It is not easy to appreciate now how it might be possible for a 'medical revolution' to take place when it involved absolutely no advance in the understanding of infections, nor any close studies of the effectiveness of different drugs or medical procedures. But 'Suttonian inoculation' was a genuine breakthrough, and was recognised as such at the time by most medical authorities. It evolved from a rejection of customary medical practice and a partial return to the simplicity of the Turkish method of inoculation. Lady Mary's anecdotal accounts of the work of the elderly Greek ladies were probably more influential than any theories about the nature of disease. It was a rustic kind of revolution which began in the Suffolk village of Kenton in the mid-eighteenth century.

Patients, Consumers, and the Enduring Challenge to Medical Authority David Shumway Jones (bio) Susan E. Cayleff. Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. 408 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. Nancy Tomes. Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 560 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $34.99 (e-book). Karen L. Walloch. The Antivaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination in the United States. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2015. xi + 339 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $125.00. It has become a mantra of retailers that “the customer is always right.” This tenet, however, has not traditionally been a guiding principle of medical practice. In the familiar narratives of medicine, physicians, not patients, have the expert knowledge and authority; physicians expect patients to follow their prescriptions. Histories have often told a story of the rise and fall of this medical authority, from the chaotic marketplace of nineteenth-century American medicine, to a “golden age” of medical authority and prestige in the 1950s, and then to the challenge that emerged as new commitments to informed consent and patients’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a consumer ethic that transformed patients into customers. Although historians have understood this narrative to be an over-simplification, the extent of the historiographic problem is demonstrated with unprecedented clarity by three new books. Of the three, only Tomes’ Remaking the American Patients focuses explicitly on the consumer transformation. However, each examines patients who, for different reasons, became skeptical of physician expertise, challenged physician authority, and asserted their right to make their own decisions. The authors treat patients’ “unorthodox” behavior with [End Page 128] seriousness and respect, showing how and why patients became disillusioned with medicine and with the commercial interests behind it. The result is not simply another patient-centric perspective on the history of medicine, of the sort launched by Susan Reverby and David Rosner’s “Beyond the Great Doctors” (1979) or Roy Porter’s “The Patient’s View” (1985).1 The books reviewed here go further and offer a fundamental correction to many historical claims that have long been taken for granted. They demonstrate that there was never a golden age of unquestioned medical authority. Instead, medical authority has been consistently challenged ever since it first took its modern form in the late nineteenth century. Patients as consumers have repeatedly asserted their right and ability to evaluate critically physicians’ claims and to make their own decisions. Cayleff’s Nature’s Path is the most straightforward. It provides the first full-length account of naturopathy as both a therapeutic practice and a way of life. As she defines it, “Naturopathy is at once a medical system and a way of living in harmony with, rather than conquering, the natural world” (p. 1). Naturopathy was one of many therapeutic systems that emerged in the nineteenth century, alongside homeopathy, hydropathy, osteopathy, and others. All share a similar narrative, with a charismatic founder who proposed an idiosyncratic theory of pathophysiology and therapeutics that found adherents but existed on the margins, increasingly persecuted as orthodox (allopathic) medicine consolidated its authority. These systems were part of broader cultural critiques, not just of medicine but also of capitalism, monopolies, pharmaceuticals, environmental pollution, and atomic energy (p. 4). Cayleff takes this basic framework and fills in the fascinating story of naturopathy, focusing on the history of the profession and its leaders, without a correspondingly detailed exploration of the experience of its patients or the ways in which its remedies provided relief (or not). With roots in German water cures, naturopathy appeared in the 1890s. Benjamin Lust, who had trained in allopathy, homeopathy, and eclectic medicine, received rights to the term “naturopathy” in 1896 and led the discipline for over half a century. Lust adopted a big-tent approach to therapeutics: his naturopathy “blended methods from nineteenth-century domestic medicine, Thomsonianism, homeopathy, botanical therapeutics, physical and health cultures, hydrotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, vegetarianism, electricity, eclecticism, sun and light cures, fasting, iridology, dietetics, hypnotism, neuropathy...

Carlos Juan Finlay, William Gorgas, and Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Controversy:Competing Historical Memories Ellen Griffith Spears (bio) and Rosa López-Oceguera (bio) several years ago, when we, as two historians, one american and one Cuban, began this inquiry into Cuban doctor Carlos Juan Finlay's collaboration with the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission during the first U.S. military occupation of Cuba from 1898 to 1902, we assumed we had chosen a non-controversial topic centered on the friendship between Finlay and American doctor William Gorgas. Correspondence between Finlay and Gorgas, sanitation director for the U.S. Army in Havana during the yellow fever campaign, had surfaced in the W. S. Hoole Collection at the University of Alabama archives and suggested a collaboration worth highlighting as relations between the two countries appeared to be warming during the administration of President Barack Obama. However, more than [End Page 62] a century after the events in question, we found we had inadvertently wandered into one of the longer running and, at times, rancorous debates in the history of medicine. Revisiting the twists and turns in the ways in which the story of yellow fever has been told illuminates important questions in the history of medicine and environmental health, including the nineteenth-century revolution in the emerging fields of bacteriology and epidemiology. This story also sheds light on the politics of disease and colonization, the racialization of science, and the role of scientific collaboration under conditions of war. As conversations deepen between contemporary U.S. and Cuban scholars, revisiting the historiography of the yellow fever campaign explores how divergent historical memories of these events collide. The discovery of the etiology and treatment of yellow fever is memorialized very differently in Cuba than in the United States. While numerous accounts today credit Finlay as identifying the mosquito vector, medical authorities at the time rejected his findings and the historical record long downplayed Finlay's pathbreaking contributions to yellow fever etiology.1 According to historian John Lawrence Tone, Walter Reed's reports in the United States on yellow fever research failed to acknowledge fully Finlay's role. In Cuba, by contrast, Finlay is a national hero, with streets, monuments, and a prize in medicine named after him. Finlay's statue stands prominently in downtown Havana, directly across from the old Academy of Sciences building, now the Carlos Finlay Historical Museum of Science. Cuba celebrates a "Día de la Medicina Latinoamericana, en Honor al Sabio Carlos J. Finlay" and designates a major medical prize annually in his honor.2 ________ carlos j. finlay, or carlos "jota" finlay, as he is known in Cuba, (December 3, 1833–August 20, 1915) was of Scottish and French descent, a first-generation Cuban, educated in France and Philadelphia. In 1857, as a twenty-five-year-old recent medical school [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A statue of Carlos Juan Finlay graces a park in downtown Havana, just across the street from the former Cuban Academy of Sciences building, now the Carlos Finlay Historical Museum of Science. All photographs taken by Ellen Griffith Spears. [End Page 64] graduate, he began researching yellow fever. In February 1881, at the International Sanitary Conference in Washington, D.C., when Finlay described his tentative hypothesis implicating the mosquito in the spread of yellow fever, his work was met with skepticism, even ridicule. However, twenty years later, Finlay's revolutionary theory and his experimental work pinpointing the insect vector provided the basis for his collaboration with U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission doctor Walter Reed and sanitation director William Gorgas in a public health campaign that effectively eradicated the disease in Havana. Dr. Finlay's correspondence with Dr. Gorgas resides in the Hoole Collection because the Gorgas family history is entwined with the history of the University of Alabama. Confederate chief of ordnance General Josiah Gorgas became president of the university for a brief period beginning in 1878. Amelia Gayle Gorgas, who was married to Josiah, directed the University of Alabama library for nearly twenty-five years and the university's main library bears her name. William Crawford Gorgas, their...

Medicine in Renaissance and Reformation Europe was a study in both continuity and change. Overall, the medical landscape was a complex web that incorporated both elite university medicine and a wide-ranging array of vernacular healing traditions, all of which competed with and influenced each other. By the early 16th century, broader trends in Renaissance culture, particularly humanism, had begun to affect university-based medical learning. The humanist scrutiny of classical texts helped lead to a number of changes, including some attempts to amend the knowledge of the ancients; a gradual increase in the perceived value of empirical investigations of the natural world; and the founding of new faculties of anatomy and botany at many universities. At the same time, classical authors such as Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle as well as medieval Arabic writers such as Avicenna remained important authorities through the 17th century. This environment produced the likes of Andreas Vesalius, Conrad Gessner, and William Harvey, all of whom combined a mixture of old ideas and new advancements. Meanwhile, an entirely new medical theory based on alchemical principles, led most prominently by the Swiss doctor Paracelsus, presented a challenge to Galenic learned medicine from outside the universities and became particularly popular at the princely courts of Europe. Throughout the period, however, university-trained physicians represented only a small proportion of healers. Far more populous were surgeons, barbers, apothecaries, midwives, and a wide variety of unlicensed healers. Although physicians increasingly attempted to bring the licensing of other practitioners under their control, the broader healing landscape remained essentially unchanged. Patients had a wide variety of healers to choose from, and healers had diverse approaches. Religious and magical forms of healing remained inexorably intertwined with naturalistic remedies, and this balance remained unchanged after the Protestant Reformation, despite changing ideas toward appropriate forms of religious healing. In many cases, the household remained the first recourse in times of illness, and women healers provided important functions in many areas of medicine. At the same time, the rapid urbanization that took place in the Renaissance led to an increased need for public health measures as well as poor relief. Individuals and towns struggled with recurrent bouts of epidemic disease throughout the time period, both acute diseases such as plague and chronic ailments like the French Disease. The latter was believed to come from the New World and represented one of the many effects that the discovery of the new continent had on medicine. An interest in finding new medicinal plants meant that medicine played an active role in commerce, global trade, and colonialism, while a rise in literacy and the invention of the printing press helped increase access to texts, both printed and manuscript. This combination of dynamic change and traditional healing structures makes the Renaissance and Reformation a complex and fascinating epoch in the history of medicine.

Barbara Zipser, John the Physician’s Therapeutics: A Medical Handbook in Vernacular Greek, Studies in Ancient Medicine, Vol. 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. x + 377, €125.00/$185.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-90-04-17723-9. - Volume 55 Issue 1

The Golden Stethoscope

Thirty-six Hippocratic Aphorisms of Nephrologic Interest

Physical Education, Exercise, Fitness and Sports: Early PM&R Leaders Build a Strong Foundation

Reviewed by: Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550 Minta Collins Jean A. GivensKaren M. ReedsAlain Touwaide, eds. Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550. AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, vol. 5. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. xx + 278 pp. Ill. $99.95 (ISBN-10: 0-7546-5296-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5296-0). Nine papers, derived from sessions at the 2003 International Congress for Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo and at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, include a general discussion of medieval images associated with medicine; six studies of illustrations in manuscript herbals, health, and natural science books; and essays on Leonardo’s anatomical studies and on his and other artists’ application of Galen’s theory of humors in sixteenth-century painting. The approach is primarily art-historical, but the valuable, detailed, and up-to-date bibliographical notes are widely interdisciplinary. This immaculately edited assembly of recent research, reviewed and reinterpreted, leads to some unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions. Peter Murray Jones typifies this in an essay in which he “eschews anachronisitic assumptions about medical illustrations” (p. 1), pointing out that there were no [End Page 704] professional medical illustrators in the Middle Ages and that illustrations did not necessarily relate to or enhance the text. He examines the different types and roles of various medically associated images in a wide range of media. Herbals and surgical texts are those most often illustrated with practical drawings, because in both cases the archetypes of the treatises were habitually illustrated. Such continuity is highlighted in Alain Touwaide’s meticulous study of an early fourteenth-century manuscript herbal. He proves that the illustrations are based on those in two early Byzantine Dioscorides’ codices, models for an archetype which he presumes was “probably” made during the period of Western occupation of Constantinople (1204–61). Jean A. Givens’s comparison of the earliest Tractatus de herbis manuscript with the fifteenth-century French translation, Livre des simples médecines, and the first English printed version, the Grete Herball, highlights the continuity of the illustrative tradition in herbals. However, her concern here is the ways in which text, page design, and navigational tools were reworked over time to facilitate the looking up of information for a changing readership. Karen M. Reeds’s examination of nature prints as another solution to the problem of picturing plants in the late fifteenth century draws attention to Leonardo’s attitude toward contemporary methods of representing plants. Claudia Swan, in her discussion of why early modern botanical treatises were illustrated, comments on the disjunction between the continuity of texts which still “depend on classical authority,” and the modernity of the pictures, the result of the “new practices of observation and demonstration” (p. 244). She does not develop the idea that the tradition of images in manuscript herbals may have been as deeply ingrained as the perpetuating of the ancient texts and the comparatively little-changing physical aspect of the books. Herbal illustrations predominate in the “tables of health,” the Tacuinum Sanitatis, produced in Lombardy for the Visconti court circa 1380–1400. Cathleen Hoeniger analyzes the sources for other, innovative, pictorial genres in these prestigious books, created for elite patrons for gifts and display. (She claims that no models existed in the herbal repertoire for recently introduced vegetables or fruit and that they may have been drawn from first-hand knowledge. However, images of those plants—eggplants, gourds, gherkins, and melons—all feature, observed from nature, in Tractatus de herbis manuscripts of ca. 1300–30.) A patron’s intervention can be seen in the distinguished manuscript of another text held in high esteem throughout the Middle Ages, Pliny’s Natural History, made for Pico della Mirandola. According to Sarah Blake McHam the images do not follow the standardized “scientific” repertory established in previous copies but illustrate anecdotes in the text, alluding to Greek and Roman culture, which had a personal appeal for Pico. The traditional idea of Leonardo as the isolated genius conducting secretive dissections is disproved in a fascinating essay by Monica Azzolini. Establishing that public autopsy and private dissection were common features of medical practice in Italy by...

Reviewed by: Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses ed. by Benjamin Elman Yumi Kim Benjamin Elman, ed. Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses. Leiden: Brill, 2015. viii + 232 pp. Ill. $135.00 (978-90-04-28544-6). Medicine in early modern East Asia (ca. 1400–1850) largely revolved around the knowledge of both ancient Chinese medical classics and critical exegeses of these classics produced by subsequent generations of physicians and scholars. The medical classics included such texts as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (Huangdi neijing, compiled first century BCE) and the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders (Shanghan zabing lun, ca. 219 CE). In the commentaries and interpretations of the classics that followed from the tenth century onward, doctors in China, Japan, and Korea engaged in a wide range of philological activities, from [End Page 713] discussing how ancient doctrines could be applied in clinical practice to correcting poorly copied manuscripts. Through tributary and commercial exchanges of books and medicinal products that reached a peak in the early modern period, a veritable East Asian community of scholar-physicians coalesced around the study, evaluation, and application of the medical classics and their commentaries. Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology explores this complex East Asian exchange of medical knowledge across time and space. A product of a series of research seminars at Princeton University, this collection of eight essays and an introduction highlights the unique challenges involved in adapting the ancient Chinese medical classics to the circumstances of early modern societies. The first two essays discuss interpretations of the medical classics in China from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Asaf Goldschmidt examines how Song dynasty (960–1276) physician Xu Shuwei used case studies, a then-innovative genre of medical writing, as a pedagogical tool aimed at helping physicians diagnose and treat Cold Damage disorders. Fabien Simonis explains the rise and fall of what he calls the “Danxi synthesis,” a syncretic approach to medicine between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries that historiography has largely overshadowed by dividing medical trends into competing schools. The remaining six essays consider the reception and adaptation of Chinese medical classics in Japan from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Daniel Trambaiolo analyzes the eighteenth-century “Ancient Formulas” (kohō) doctors who rejected the dominant Song medical style in favor of restoring ancient medicine through philological study of classical texts. Mathias Vigouroux explores the reception of acupuncture in Japan from 1500 to 1800, employing a comparative framework to trace the transmission and uses of the circulation channels theory in both Japan and China. Susan Burns turns our attention from elite physicians to a nineteenth-century village doctor who, like his elite and urban counterparts, engaged with the canonical texts and medical debates of his time while treating patients in rural areas. Federico Marcon considers the modern fate of a field of early modern nature study (honzōgaku) developed out of a corpus of Chinese medicinal texts. Angela Ki Che Leung maps the varied uses of ancient medical knowledge on a disorder called kakké in Japanese and jiaoqi in Chinese, now considered to mostly overlap with symptoms of beriberi. Mayanagi Makoto, in the final essay, charts the transfer of Chinese medical texts and Japanese rare books in the Kojima family’s medical collection into the hands of the Chinese diplomat Yang Shoujing in the late nineteenth century. Specialists in the history of premodern and early modern East Asian medicine will appreciate the broad scope and variety of topics in Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology. Nonspecialists may find the volume less accessible, for it assumes substantial background knowledge of terms and historiographies. In order to appeal to scholars in the history of medicine or East Asian history, it would have been helpful if more of the essays had explained the broader political and social contexts that constrained, enabled, or otherwise conditioned the activities of physicians and scholars grappling with the ancient classics. A few of the authors engage in such contextualization, but most present a seemingly insulated world [End Page 714] of medical ideas and exchanges. Finally, it is unfortunate that there are no essays...

"The electronic training course ""History of Medicine"" is compiled in accordance with the requirements of the federal state educational standard of higher education 3++ for specialties 05/31/2011. Medical care, 05/32.01. Preventive medicine, 05/31/02. Pediatrics, 05/31/03. Dentistry The purpose of the course is to study the history, patterns and logic of the development of healing, medicine and healthcare of the peoples of the world from antiquity to the beginning of the XXI century. Course objectives: to teach students to objectively analyze historical phenomena, achievements and prospects for the development of medicine and healthcare; to reveal the achievements of outstanding civilizations in the field of medicine in the context of the progressive development of mankind; to show the interaction of national and international factors in the formation of medical science and practice in various regions of the globe; to inculcate ethical principles of medical practice and the historical conditions of their formation in various countries; to cultivate high moral qualities in students: love for their profession, loyalty to duty, feelings of humanism and patriotism; expand the general scientific and cultural horizons of students. to form among students the most important cultural and historical guidelines for the civil self-identification of the individual, the assimilation of basic professional values and competencies; to develop the ability to analyze and compare medical information about the past contained in various sources; to motivate students to maintain their health and lead a healthy lifestyle. The complexity of the course: 72 classroom hours are allocated for the study of this discipline, including 36 hours of lectures and 36 hours of seminars."